Censorship and Trade

A while back I wrote some thoughts about re-framing Internet censorship as a trade barrier. While I’m still uncertain about the consequences of doing so, I recently found this article (via freedom4internet) arguing:

Internet censorship is effectively preventing thousands of American and European e-commerce websites from reaching Chinese consumers, declare Internet marketing consultants Backbone IT Group in a recent study.

The main argument seems to be that sites hosted outside of China take 20 times as long to load as they do inside China. I don’t doubt that foreign hosted websites take longer to load in fact that is why Google and others now have servers in China. But I’d like to know how these load times stack up to other countries. Is it because of China’s filtering? Or is it something else.

I ran a few tests from websitepulse (see below) and China seemed to lead sites faster than Singapore and Australia. Rigorous tests would definitely be more appropriate, but I think these anecdotal tests indicate that a closer look at the methodology and data for this study would be prudent.

I am also wondering just how many ecommerce sites accept payment from China, from Chinese credit cards. In the past, Godaddy confirmed that they don’t process transactions from China (this was a while ago, it could be different now). I’m not sure how widespread this practice is but I wouldnt be surprised if many ecommerce sites don’t accept payment from China.